In addition to driving technology change, Valve pointed to the PC platform as pushing forward content distribution methods. It should be no surprise that Valve referred to its own service, Steam, as an exemplar of PC gaming's strengths. It allows for patches to roll out more continuously when compared to the thorny certification process required by Microsoft on its Xbox 360 console, and Valve does this completely free of charge. This kind of freedom and opportunity for autonomy for small developers and large publishers makes it an ideal portal for game releases, says Valve.

"The game business is going through a big transformation right now," Newell said. "We're going through a transformation from being very focused on buying lots of TV ads to drive sales of boxes with optical media through retail channels into a business where you have a community that you're providing a service to, an ongoing entertainment service." Newell went on to talk about how Valve is seeing a better return on tools that foster community and better tie users together, which ties into the announcement it made regarding future Steam updates.

At some unspecified future date, Valve will release for free what it calls Steam Cloud, which will allow players' game saves to be stored on Valve's servers. That way, if your hard drive crashes, you reformat your drive, buy a new hard drive, or play on a PC at a friend's house, your saves will always be stored and accessible. Valve says it plans on implementing this kind of feature into all the Half-Life franchise games as well as saving settings and key bindings for games like Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, as well as its upcoming co-operative shooter Left 4 Dead.

Still waiting on news about Half-Life 2: Episode 3...

Beyond that, Valve wants to expand on its Steam community features. We've already seen how it's possible for developers to add Steam achievements to their games and how in Team Fortress 2 unlocking certain amounts of achievements translates to in-game rewards. In the future Valve plans on adding Steam features that make it easy for gamers to identify how their system might run the game, as Valve has compiled loads and loads of data regarding how its customers' systems perform when running games purchased through its service. Throughout the meeting and into the question and answer session that followed, Newell repeatedly stressed the importance of real-time data for player behavior, hardware performance, and sales for identifying what's important for future game releases. "Having real-time data on game player behavior is hugely more important to making good decisions going forward as a game designer than your fill rate or your polygon rate," he said.

Exactly how detailed the Steam system requirement checker might turn out to be remains to be seen, but we were told it would likely give you a ballpark estimate of what your frames per second might be as well as possibly recommend what the most effectively way to boost performance might be. Also interesting was Valve's assertion that Steam would eventually be able to check your hardware drivers to ensure everything's updated as it should be, allow users to share their own video and screens, and provide easy to use community portals tied to each of the games available through the service.

More than just updates to foster more of a sense of community and centralize the fragmentary chaos of the platform's user base, Valve envisions the PC market as being wholly and undeniably global. Newell says many publishers out there still think of the gaming scene as being divided into territories, whereas Valve sees no reason every game release shouldn't be worldwide. Steam is currently available in 21 different languages and pushing into the Russian market, which companies like Valve and Steam believe is rife with potential for revenue.

Valve claims that many are wary of new markets because of the "P" word, piracy, that gets referenced again and again in the PC community as the reason, or at least part of the reason, a product didn't do as well as expected. "We don't have piracy," said Newell. "We've never had a discussion about piracy being one of the things that's going to affect the success or failure of Left 4 Dead."

Jason Holtman, Valve's director of business development, wasn't quite as dismissive. He sees those who engage in game piracy as business opportunities, particularly in Russia, an emerging gaming market with 17 million PCs in use. "It used to be two years back or even today if you asked somebody other than us about Russia, they would tell you, 'That's just crazy.' Because everybody was focused on the English-language versions and traditional models, they were shipping in English, they were shipping in those known places and the Russians were going, 'I can read English, I know that game's out, I'm not getting it for six months.' What's going to happen? You're going to have this company step in, it's going to grab the game, it's going to grab Russian audio, it's going to ship it and you're going to be wildly pirated." Valve was essentially saying its worldwide distribution service solves this problem, though it's difficult to get a real sense of any of this since there aren't any comprehensive, reliable methods of tracking how much damage piracy is doing. Holtman went on to add that "rampant piracy is just unserved customers."

Major updates are regularly rolling out for Team Fortress 2.

In addition to pushing into new territory, Valve sees microtransactions as a definite possibility for its future releases. "The microtransaction stuff is really interesting," Newell said. "I've seen some presentations from [Nexon] where even though they're giving away the products for free they're actually generating on average more revenue per customer. Essentially you're using your rabid fans to subsidize your super-casual fans, and what you end up doing is getting a much larger community of people who are activated around the product and higher overall revenue even though you're giving away your product to some of those people. That's super-fascinating." The question that remains for Valve is how to best apply this model to the broad range of gaming genres out there.

So when will people start to take notice of what's happening with PC gaming? Might it have anything to do with the PC Gaming Alliance? "We're still waiting to see concretely what's going to come out of the Gaming Alliance," said Newell. "We really believe in shipping products as one of the best ways to move stuff forward. I think Wrath of the Lich King [the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion] shipping will have a larger impact moving the PC forward as a gaming platform than companies sending representative together to all agree that PC gaming should be doing better."